usk-ulicious

Last week I went over to Wales, invited by the National Parks Authority to help launch some new fishing guidebooks they’ve had published. I hadn’t fished on the Usk for years, and fancied the excuse to return. I arranged a few hours pre-launch on the Gliffaes hotel top beat – one of my favourite bits of water anywhere. The beat may only be a few hundred yards long, but the river here is a trick-of-the-eye staircase of water – several rivers in one – and in spring it can keep you absorbed for a day. I particularly like fishing on the Usk in spring. There’s no need to hurry. Nothing happens before eleven. And it’s all over by four. The means you can down a monster breakfast – on this morning it was the finest of all, a white-bread bacon sarnie and a mug of tea from a roadside van in a parking bay somewhere on the A40 – skip lunch, and be off the river by tea-time, which at Gliffaes means a Bacchanalian feast of cake. The beat was mine for the day, so I felt in even less of a hurry, knowing that the river would be “coming on” just as I got to it. The sun was shining. A little warmth was pushing into the air as I strolled across the riverside meadow that slopes down to the edge of the Usk. But as I did so I noticed a hat popping up and down over the edge of the bank half way up my beat, as though someone was kneeling down there and performing unnatural acts with sheep. The hat – it turned out – belonged to some old gaffer in enormous Ocean waders, with a piece of string round his neck who was in fact trying and failing to biff a tiny trout on the head. The trout flicked feebly around the bank, while the blows rained down inaccurately around it. I let him carry on for a bit, then asked: “So you’re fishing this beat today?” He looked up, startled and said, “Ah, well, yes. Me and my fwend are fishing beats two and three.” “And this is beat one isn’t it?.” “Ah, yes. Well ... Er... I was just fishing it till you got here.” Fantastic. I’m going to have to remember that one. What a justification for just about any nefarious activity, from poaching upwards .... “I was just ... driving your Porsche / shagging your wife / using your money ... till you got here.” Brilliant.

As was the fishing, by the way.

First published 22nd April 2008